Julius Caesar, who is the most commonly identified Roman tyrant, did not transform Rome into an autocracy. Although Caesar played a crucial role in that transformation, Augustus, a generation later, is really the one who created and solidified autocracy at Rome. Moreover, the problem was greater than any one person or group of people and was decades in the making. Rome does not provide a model for a way out of this descent into autocracy. Just as Polybius pointed out that the Romans were not excluded from the law of anacyclosis, the rise and fall of states, so the United States is not excluded either. The danger for America is assuming that Trump was the source of our political problems. The republic of the United States has outlived the presidency of Donald Trump, though the dynastic aspirations of his children and their spouses should not be dismissed; Augustus's success where Caesar failed should give pause to anyone looking to celebrate Trump's departure from the White House. Most certainly, the republic has not overcome the crises Trump exploited and accelerated. If the United States is going to outlive the next authoritarian candidate, whether from the left or the right, we will need to radically change our politics.

The forces that Trump has brought into the light have been latent in the US political system for decades, if not from its origins: misogyny, xenophobia, racism, economic inequality. Trump did not invent them, though he kept alive and nourished these divisions for his own gain. Trump is no longer president, but our long-standing divisions are still with us waiting for someone to exploit them. In addition, Trump's reckless political behavior has provided precedents for any successors, who, regardless of political party, will find them hard to resist. Augustus succeeded where Caesar failed because he learned from Caesar's mistakes and exploited the political precedents established in the last century of the Republic. The real question is not what to do with a leader like Trump. The real question before us is what to do with our republic, which is greatly diminished. Over eighty million Americans voted for Joe Biden and nearly seventy-five million voted for Donald Trump. Whatever wishful thinking either party engages in, a sizable minority will be supporting the other party for the foreseeable future. Demographics alone will not change this; the departure of Donald Trump will not change this.